Saturday, December 29, 2007

See the video here. (The second part of the video is about Metaverse1 rationale)This is Yesha Sivan's talk for the Metanomics TV program. This is part of the Metaversed series of talks about the Metaverse. This is a MP4 almost 1 hr video where Robert J. Bloomfield, Nicholas H. Noyes Professor of Management from Cornell Johnson Scool of Management asks me some difficult questions about the future.

This video can serve as a good intro to the long term value of the Metaverse.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Hi, I'm Jean Gelissen from Philips Research in the Netherlands and have the privilege to be the project leader of the Metaverse1 ITEA2 project. I have quite some experience in conducting ITEA projects; I have been the initiator and project leader of 4 subsequent ITEA projects related to embedded software for consumer devices. The projects EUROPA, Robocop, Space4U and Trust4All started with the functional aspects op component based embedded software but gradually moved into the non functional aspects with software (life cycle) management and trustworthiness of the installed software base as major non functional aspects. The project series has been completed in July 2007 and has, among others, resulted in an international (ISO) standard for embedded software, ISO/IEC 23006 MPEG-E.

Early 2007 I attended the ITEA project outline symposium and Yesha made me very enthusiastic for the developments around the Metaverse but also made me aware of all the complications to make it really happen. During this meeting I agreed to take the coordination for the Metaverse1 initiative in the ITEA context aiming at providing the conditions to allow the Metaverse to grow towards a mature business. From that moment on it was hard work to gather a project consortium and compose a project proposal. At this moment (December 2007) we have an ITEA labeled project composed out of 46 partners in 8 European countries for a budget of 26.5MEuro or 324 person years for a duration of 2.5 years. At the moment we are working on the local (funding) conditions in all eight countries to allow for the project start in the second quarter of 2008.

The project will follow a use case driven approach by defining a wide span of use cases and in parallel execute a state of the art overview (SOTA). From the requirements derived from the use cases we will define a global framework / architecture for virtual worlds and the relation to the real world. Next step is to define, based on the SOTA and the defined frame work what essential technologies / interfaces are missing and to work on the design and development of these missing elements. Please note that we don't have the intention to re-invent some wheels, all that is available, that's the reason for the extensive SOTA, will be used. We will focus on the missing essential elements. The project concludes with instantiating the frame-work for all the use cases and use these demonstrators for the validation of the achievements with respect to the goals set (the requirements to fulfill). In parallel we will work on the standardization to secure the results of all the activities (of course the own developments but also record all the parts out of the SOTA that can be applied in this context).

If you want to know more about this initiative feel free to contact me.

The Metaverse1 project will provide: a standardized global framework enabling the interoperability between Virtual worlds (as for example Second Life, World of Warcraft, IMVU, Active Worlds, Google Earth and many others) and the Real world (sensors, actuators, vision and rendering, social and welfare systems, banking, insurance, travel, real estate and many others).